My e-Democracy ‘08 15. November 2008 – 20:37 by Rolf Luehrs

Although a bit late, I would like to share some of my impressions from Dan Jellinek’s (headstar) e-Democracy conference which took place in London Tuesday this week.

First of all: I enjoyed the conference very much! The RIBA was a real nice venue and lots of interesting plenary sessions and workshops have been presented.

The conference started with two keynotes by Helen Boaden, Director of News, BBC, and Tom Steinberg, founder of MySociety.

Helen talked about what social media means for journalism. She especially highlighted three aspects: the increasing speed of the news beat caused by eyewitnesses equipped with communication technologies (“accidential journalism”), citizen newsgathering and the interaction with those formally known as readers or listeners, some of whom have now become active participants.

Both, increased speed and increased interactivity have to be perceived as major challenges by the BBC which has not given up the ambition to deliver high quality journalistic content. However, the attitude is still positive: “It’s no surprise (…) that the BBC has gone from passively accepting user-generated content to positively soliciting it. It’s not just a “nice to have” - it can really enrich our journalism and provide our audiences with a wider diversity of voices than we could otherwise deliver.”

For those who want to learn more about the BBC’s social media approach, I recommend to read the full keynote speech which Helen published at her blog.

While Helen delivered at the same time an example on the perfect usage of PowerPoint, Tom just showed one website to support his talk – a very funny one, though.

Tom’s speech was titled “A year in e-Democracy” and this year has been dominated by the US elections. Paul Johnston has already summarised Tom’s talk well, so that I do not have to repeat it here.

Next to mention – in order of appearance – was the plenary session “eParticipation in Europe” which has been presented by PEP-NET. As mentioned earlier this session included presentations Renate Mitterhuber (Head of Department for E-Government, City of Hamburg), Csaba Madarász (Central and Eastern European Citizens Network, Hungary) and Julia Glidden (Board Member, MOMENTUM Project and Managing Director, 21c Consultancy). Our session has been well received and I can’t resist to cite from Peter Cruickshank’s post:

First up, Renate Mitterhuber from the city-state of Hamburg:a fascinating success story, showing the impact the technology can make when it becomes pervasive: e-government and e-participation now seem to be the default. They have moved from piloting and demonstrating consultation (eg how to manage the growth of the city), to having it as part of the normal political procesess, particularly when it comes to planning decisions.

PEP-NET does seem to be one example where a relatively small amount of EU money is paying off, especially if it can move from networking to delivering. It’s certainly creating a lot of buzz.

There were other presentations I found really interesting, among them Tobias Escher’s research on evaluation of eParticipation, which he did on behalf of MySociety. He promised to share his slides soon on the organisation’s website.

The conference ended with an interesting panel discussion about citizen involvement, social media and politics chaired by Paul Johnston (Head of European Public Sector, Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group). The panellists were Margaret Moran (MP, Chair, EURIM), Peter Bazalgette (Director, YouGov),Willie Rennie (MP, Chair, Liberal Democrats Parliamentary Campaigns Team ) and Iain Dale (Publisher, Total Politics Magazine)

The discussion turned out quite controversial. The participants disagreed especially regarding the role and value of blogs. Iain Dale has meanwhile published an article about the dispute on his blog (where else?) which received lots of comments.

For more coverage of this event, please visit the conference website.

Tags: E-Democracy '08, inenglish